Tag: Grant Clauser

ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

Sunday, February 1

Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Featured Readers: Kim Stafford, Kari Gunter-Seymour, J.D. Isip, Todd Davis, Grant Clauser

Tickets are FREE!

(donations appreciated)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Grant Clauser’s latest book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. He is the author of five previous books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven and Reckless Constellations. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review and anthologies including Keystone Poetry and The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. His books and poems have won numerous awards including the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He’s an editor for a national media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. More at grantclauser.com

Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and soon-to-be professor emeritus of Environmental Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University.

J.D. Isip is a Pushcart and Bet of the Net nominated writer and professor of English, originally from Southern California, and currently living and teaching in South Texas. His full-length collections of poetry and creative nonfiction include Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015), Kissing the Wound, and Reluctant Prophets (both from Moon Tide Press, 2023 and 2025). He is currently editing The American Pop Culture Almanac, forthcoming for America’s 250th (Summer 2026) from Moon Tide Press.

Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

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Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

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To the Carol Singer at the End of the Anthropocene Mall

A week until Christmas and the mall mostly
ghost town, one Macy’s still struggles
on like a steam engine against new highways.
Even the store manager buys his gifts online.
I stop in the rotunda while my wife browses
past empty boutiques. Teenagers searching
for irony pose for photos with a jaundiced Santa.
On the small stage, a lone singer with piano
pokes through an app for carols she knows,
settles on White Christmas, then slides into
I’ll Be Home… while an audience of three
stare into our phones or Starbucks cups.
We’re all a mess of distraction and regret.
And how can we not be? The season trying hard
to cheer us into a new year. Signs for lease
and loss all around. Trauma so common
it becomes a kind of faith. She sings like she knows
none of this. She sings like an evening campfire,
like snow over a plowed field, like a table
set for the whole family. She sings
as they say, her heart out, which takes
all her strength to carry home.

*

The Last Christmas

Eventually the weather turns
on all of us, and then
you find yourself in a forest
without recognizing the trail.
Every tree older or broken by winter.
Loved ones gone or going
dawn by dawn.

It’s harder now to get back.
Children grown, and the days
imitate water flowing over falls.
We say that creaking in the foundation
is ground settling and not decay
in the heart’s bedrock

breaking apart.

*

Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.

Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop with Grant Clauser

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Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop
Instructor: Grant Clauser
Day: Wednesday, July 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm (Eastern)
Price: $25

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Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop
Nature has long been used as setting and inspiration for poems, and as metaphors for exploring the personal and social issues. This workshop will explore how the non-human world can provide language, metaphors, and models for examining our place in the universe. We’ll look at classic and contemporary models, discuss theories and poetic practices for using nature as a subject in poetry, and work together on some strategies for writing new poems.

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

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Epistemology VIII

Despite my field guides, I forget the names
of most trees, the fourteen varieties of fern
that fringe this lake. Even the talk of birds
is over my head, yet I can tell a distant shower
from a thunderhead by the smell, a campfire
from a lightning scorch by its whisper or wail.
If I call the scent of spice bush ground
between my fingers the wrong time
of year it’s still sweeter than magpies,
and the steel string voice a bird makes
from marshland at the meadow’s edge
is not a band I listened to in college,
but strikes a note of longing I understand
better than the shapes stars make
on a clear night in the mountains.
Their anonymous pairing with Greek myths
part of the mystery of what keeps them
in the sky.

*

Epistemology IX

Tonight’s campfire is mostly decorative,
something to conjure ghosts and hold back mosquitoes.
If bats twist overhead, I don’t see them.
If a large shadow comes down the mountain
to drink from the lake, it doesn’t ask permission.
What do I know about why nations crash
into each other with the regularity of rain?
Tonight in the woods I try for a kind of peace
that can watch smoke rise from kindling,
that talks back only to the voices in the heart.

*

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College.

Synonyms for Joy by Grant Clauser

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Synonyms for Joy
           after Bird Language by W H Auden

Mornings when a fox has visited
in the night, my dog will race out the back door
to roll in fox pee, his pupils disappearing
behind his brow in trance though he must know
this means a bath, and if I’m being ambitious,
a nail trim too, but just like my diabetic grandfather
who would risk a day of illness for five minutes
with an apple pie, he wheels in the fresh pee
anyway. And I’m forced to admit again
that dogs aren’t so different from us,
rolling our eyes at consequences,
near-sighted to regret.

*

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College.

Four Poems by Grant Clauser

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Fireline Trail

This trail, marked in yellow blazes
for the mapless and lost, where lookouts
once kept eyes awake for smoke and fire,
begins in white pines, the edges
needlesoft and quiet, then blends
into proud old chestnut oaks standing
straight a hundred feet in a kind
of wisdom. At the top, where paper birch
lean toward the gorge, unwrapping
in the almost noonness of the sun,
a meadow filled with low blueberry
bushes stretches until the mountain
bends to the river. I pick my fill
of ripe ones, miles from highway
traffic and the river now dying
from mine acid. Here, so much free sweetness
within easy reach the world must be
playing a trick. Maybe it’s not
that life is hard. Just our expectations
too high. Eyes bigger than your stomach
my mother used to warn. I’ll leave most
of the berries here for birds. Begin
the switchback down to the car, back
through those oaks, the dark quiet
of pines, the day’s haze that leads
toward home, the taste of blueberries,
the whole marvelous mountain,
still on my lips.

*

Weeping Willow

When you’re eight years old
and pull enough of the whip-like
branches into your hands, take
a running start and lift your legs,
half the tree may bend, but still
you’re flying for a little while,
swinging in the sun’s arc
over the rock your brother calls
the Volkswagen because it’s almost
as big as the neighbors’ blue Beetle,
and when you let go, wild leaping
out over the rock onto soft ground,
rolling down the hill into the always
wet part of the yard, you know that
sting in your hands from landing
will go away, just like everything,
the last two times your parents packed
to move, some new tree waiting
at the new house, your knee bruised
again through your hand-me-down jeans.

*

White Pine

Down in the ravine
where the Black Creek’s
stoneflies compete
with gravity, and the water
competes with boulders,
almost everything
is part shadow, even me
when I crept up on the bear
scratching his rump
on the rough bark
of a pine, the small tree
shaking with every shove
of his legs and spine
til needles sprinkled
down on him and into
the cool brook trout
waters of the creek.
This went on for minutes.
The tree pushing back
against the yearling’s itch,
the creek slipping by
unnoticed, me frozen
in shadow trying to save
every moment in memory,
that place I go to more
often these days,
that place I feel better
in, rubbing shoulders
with the past, making
the minutes last.

*

White Pine II

Who doesn’t stop to marvel
at big trees? This forest, clear cut
completely at least twice shouldn’t
have a pine so massive.
It would take my whole family
to wrap around its trunk
like a bear hug, reward
for standing still
a couple centuries.
Upstream a mile
the remains of a mill
that ground this mountain bare.
Downstream a cemetery
remembers the flood
that washed the valley clean.
If this great old tree
remembers anything
I hope it forgets the sounds
of saws and chains.
The train whistle bearing
coal to Philadelphia.
The one great fire
that finished finally
the town. I hope
for wind and sun. Some
redstarts nesting
100 feet in boughs
still growing, getting
farther and farther
from the ground.

*

Grant Clauser is the author of five books including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award) and Reckless Constellations (winner of the Cider Press Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry and others. He works as an editor and teaches at Rosemont College.